ESXi 5 and IBM BladeCenter HS21 - IBM hangs us out to dry?

[tinkerdude]

We have a lot of HS21's. One of our ESXi 4.1 clusters is made up of HS21's in a BladeCenter E.

The HS21 can be outfitted with 8 cores (we use 2 Xeon quad-core E54XX), 64GB RAM and 8 network/fibre channel interfaces (using an attached expansion blade). While the HS21 isn't the newest hardware on the block, those are quite respectable specs for a VMWare host.

We were getting ready to do a routine upgrade of RAM and add some blades to the cluster when we discovered, much to our surprise and chagrin, that IBM is apparently pulling support for ESXi 5 on the HS21!

See:

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/info/x86servers/serverproven/compat/us/nos/vmwaree.html

Note the distinct absence of a checkmark at the intersection of HS21 and vSphere 5.

I was astonished. And somewhat miffed, frankly. Why would IBM yank VMware support for what is obviously a totally legit ESXi platform?

HP didn't yank support for their comparable blades (BL260C G5, BL460C G5, BL480C G5)

See: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/vmware/supportmatrix/hpvmware.html

Dell didn't yank support for their comparable blades (PowerEdge 1955, PowerEdge M600)

See: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/eslvmwre/VS_5/Docs/Compat/Com_Mat.pdf

Actually, some of these HP and Dell models spec out as somewhat inferior to the HS21, But they're still all supported.

As a matter of fact, if you look in the chart in that IBM link above, you can see that IBM even supports its OWN inferior blade - the HS12 (max 4 E54XX cores/24GB RAM/4 interfaces).

What is up with THAT?

To me, this provides the appearance that IBM is artificially forcing a big chunk of its VMware blade users to buy more hardware from them unnecessarily.

In our case, since we can't use HS21's, we not only would have to buy new blades, but an entirely new chassis (BladeCenter H) as well, since you can't use any other blade in a BladeCenter E and get a decent interface count for VMware.

Can anyone come up with a plausible technical reason for pulling ESXi 5 support? - some justification for me to NOT believe IBM is using vendor lock-in here to hose their base of HS21 VMware users?

[bschrempp]

I was just wondering the same thing myself, doesn't seem to be much information or discussion out there on it.  Kind of disappointing if it's just unsupported and that's the end of the story.

[joltra]

We have also some HS21 servers and we were thinking about an upgrade but after seeing your post we don't know what to do.

If you find out some solution please post it. I'll do the same.

Thanks in advance.

[Hilmy]

We also have HS21's which we just upgraded to ESXi 5 on. After the upgrade, I came accross this thread and believe me, i'm not very happy about this as we now don't have support for these blades. But just to give you a heads up, you shouldn't have a problem if you decide to upgrade on this hardware, everything went smoothly over here.

However inlight of this, we'll be looking at upgrading our ESX hosts very soon.

[kinder83]

Good afternoon, I'm in the same situation. Ready to migrate to vsphere 5.1 when I discovered that hs21 in not supported from VMWare.

Hilmy the problem I think is not technically, I quite sure that if I install esxi 5 on blade hs21 I will have no problems.

But the problem is about support and warranty.  For example, if the future you will have a problem (I hope no, in Italy we say TOUCH IRON!), could you open a ticket in IBM or open a ticket in VMWare?

Unfortunatly I think that the first answer from the support will be: "Have you a hs21 with esxi 5? Yes? I'm sorry is not supported!". Same thing with other vendor like VMware or for example, in my case, with Symantec for the backup.

I hope in an answer from someone....or better from some guru of VMWare...!